Last week we wrote about the long-delayed update to the main Chain of Custody (CoC) standard of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).  In our post, we call attention to the fact that 28,521 certified companies depend on the details of this standard for their daily business and encouraged FSC to finally reveal the changes that are planned.  A colleague from Germany wrote to point out that the number we used is actually too small.  Because many companies certify in cooperative groups, the actual...

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is very proud of the fact that it's program is among the most successful "green" certification standards in history.  Evidence of this impressive fact is the "Facts and Figures" information, displayed prominently on the FSC's website.  Prominent in this display is the fact that over 28,000 companies have acquired a FSC Chain of Custody certificate. We have written extensively about FSC CoC.  Our basic position has always been this:  The FSC standard is...

The US affiliate of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) posted a short article in their periodic newsletter yesterday.   The article calls attention to the imminent release of the lasted update to the main FSC Chain of Custody standard (FSC-STD-40-004).   This is Important The recent troubles with the release of a new multi-site standard should serve as a warning to all of us of the importance to watch these processes closely.  FSC has been working on this update for a very long time....

We learned yesterday that FSC-IC took action to resolve the potentially serious flaw in their new Multi-site Chain of Custody (CoC) standard.  Although we wrote about this just last week, and received a lot of response to our piece (thanks to all for that), it appears that a solution to this problem had been in the works for some time. Here is yesterday's communication from Lucia Massaroth - CoC Program Manager in Bonn: However this came about, we are impressed by the willingness of FSC-IC to...

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) published the latest update to its standard for Multi-site Chain of Custody certification (FSC-STD-40-003 v.2-0)  earlier this fall.  It became public during the busy time just before the General Assembly, when FSC was also making interesting and important announcements about the fate of its Online Claims Platform (OCP) initiative and related commentary about "gaps" in the Chain of Custody program.  Most industry watchers - including MixedWood - gave it...

Earlier this year, we wrote extensively about the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) program's public consultation process for the update of their standards.  We gave SFI high marks for conducting a very thorough and transparent process to release a complete set of discussion drafts of its entire set of standards and guidance documents.  We also encouraged attendance at an ambitious series of public meetings that were held across the US & Canada. The draft standards were - in a word - a...